stackyFACTSYou cannot put a toll booth on a sidewalk beam. Illumination is the textbook example of a service that everyone demands but absolutely nobody wants to voluntarily fund, forcing municipalities to collectively extract the cost just to keep pedestrians from falling into open manholes.
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Try charging a captain for looking at a light. Economists love using coastal illumination to explain non-excludable goods, meaning once the beam is on, you…
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Those brightly colored metal stumps on the sidewalk don't just sit there for free. Inspecting, flushing, and preventing fire hydrants from freezing in the…
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Having five different competing trash trucks driving down the exact same street every morning is comically inefficient. Some services are so highly dependent…
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Missiles do not ask for your receipt before intercepting threats. Because it is physically impossible to protect a single neighborhood while letting the…
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When a city tries to buy land for a new highway, the very last guy on the block realizes he is the sole bottleneck. This holdout problem gives him infinite…
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Why bother innovating when you can just rewrite the rules? Rent-seeking is the act of increasing one's own share of existing wealth without actually creating…
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